Family Values has a Whole New Meaning in Small Business

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In today’s world of work, we’re seeing a power shift from employer to employee. Employees are pushing organizations to be better every day, and demanding that employers create an environment within which they want to work.

This is important because workplace culture is key to employee engagement. More organizations, regardless of their size, industry or location, are seeing the importance of driving and building employee engagement, as it can directly impact profitability, customer experience and the company’s overall success. In fact, according to a Willis Towers Watson report, companies with high scores on all aspects of sustainable engagement outperform their sectors in terms of earnings growth by an average of 18%.

In my last post, I cited a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review which examined what it called “the overcommitted organization” – a look at the benefits of multi-teaming, but also the challenges that arise, and what organizations can do to solve them.

Multi-teaming has become ubiquitous, in part because the benefits are so recognizable. However, the article highlighted an important point. While recognizing the benefits of multi-teaming and cross-functional collaboration, few organizations acknowledge the impact of over-leveraging their teams, and how both the organization and individual employees are affected. There’s a clear cost: burnout.

Companies competing for the best candidates have multiple ways to find and entice job seekers to work for them. Traditionally, recruiters would sift through resumes, tap their network or check specific keywords on LinkedIn.

That was then. Recruiting, like many other industries, is facing change thanks to a blend of technology, attitudes and expectations, and it’s a competitive landscape for employer differentiation thanks to an increasingly inefficient job market.

The idea underlying the trends and shifts in HCM that leaders expect in 2018 all link back to how the workplace is evolving.

“Leaders are embracing the idea that adopting technology should help us work smarter, and not harder, and that instead of pushing people to do more, we should instead be thinking about what tasks we can leverage technology for, particularly repetitive and administrative ones, to free our people up for higher level, more creative and arguably more challenging and fulfilling activities,” says Ceridian’s SVP Corporate Strategy and Development Justine Kilby.

In a recent issue, the Harvard Business Review examined what it called “the overcommitted organization.” It’s a very detailed look at something that happens across all industries and companies: people are assigned or cross-leveraged to multiple projects at once.

There are definite advantages to cross-leveraging employees. Projects can benefit from collective brainpower and knowledge sharing, which encourages learning and dissemination of best practices across the organization. But there are also huge costs if the risks are not managed. Over-leveraging your employees can lead to a drop in productivity, loss of engagement, and personal and team burnout.